Not a Jack of All Trades

Not a jack of all trades Nursing — Krupp (ICU, stroke unit, anesthesiology) Medicine — Marburg (pre-clinical, on the Folkwang card) Research infrastructure — Fraunhofer (library, knowledge services) Industrial design — Folkwang (Hassenzahl, BA thesis) Automotive design — Mercedes, Audi, KISKA Spatial design — Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield Hospitality & retail — WDR Funkhaus, Diesel, Moleskine Customer experience & operations — Grau Global premium B2B — Birkenstock Independent research practice — Self-Directed pivot year Business strategy — Quantic MBA Eleven professional environments. Within medicine alone: neurology, surgery, anesthesiology, ICU, stroke unit, internal medicine, geriatrics. Within design: transportation, interior, spatial, communication, photography. Each one a different mode of attention, a different set of constraints, a different definition of what "good" means — and the same set of principles refined across all of them. I've seen the look — the slight tilt of the head when someone scans the CV, the polite recalculation happening behind the eyes. Interesting background. Which is the professional way of saying: what exactly are you? The honest answer is that I'm the product of compound experience — and compound experience doesn't read well on a linear document. A CV is a timeline. It rewards depth in a single domain and treats breadth as indecision. But a career isn't a timeline. It's a stack. And each layer in the stack changes what the next layer can do. Let me be specific about what each environment deposited. Nursing gave me the diagnostic instinct. Three years of clinical training in anesthesiology, then ICU and stroke unit rotations across four hospitals. What you learn in safety-critical healthcare isn't medicine — it's a way of operating. Observe before you intervene. Document what's actually happening, not what you expect to be happening. Make decisions with incomplete information. Tolerate ambiguity without freezing. These aren't nursing skills. They're operating skills. They transfer to everything. Medicine — two semesters of pre-clinical studies at Marburg — taught me where my leverage was. I could have become a physician. I chose not to, because I recognized that designing the systems around patient care could create impact at a scale that individual clinical encounters couldn't. That decision — choosing systemic intervention over individual treatment — has defined every career choice since. Folkwang gave me the methodology. Hassenzahl's experience-first framework, the Bauhaus inheritance, the interdisciplinary instinct. But also: the tolerance for ambiguity that comes from studying inside a building where art, music, theater, and science share walls. The understanding that the boundaries between disciplines are artificial and that the most useful thinking happens across them. The Fraunhofer library taught me research infrastructure. Not how to conduct research — how to enable it. How the organization of information shapes what gets found. How the person operating the system needs to understand the inquiry the system serves. This became the foundation of everything I later built at Grau. Spatial design at URW gave me scale. Millions of people moving through environments I helped shape. But more importantly, it gave me the experience of seeing behavioral data that had no home inside the organization's decision-making structure. Insight without infrastructure. That failure — that specific gap — became the problem I spent the next decade solving. Hospitality — WDR Funkhaus, Diesel, Moleskine — during the transition years. These aren't prestige lines on a CV. They're where I learned how customer-facing systems work and break under daily operational pressure. The barista who watches the same service failure happen every morning and can't get anyone to fix it — that person understands customer experience at a level that no journey map captures. I was that person. It shaped what I built later. Grau was the convergence. Four years inside a premium manufacturer during COVID and a generational transition, building CX infrastructure from scratch. Every capability from every previous environment was active simultaneously. Clinical observation to diagnose the problems. Design methodology to frame the solutions. Research infrastructure thinking to build systems, not one-off fixes. Spatial awareness to understand the physical retail environments. Hospitality instinct to read customer-facing operations from the inside. Grau didn't use one of my skills. It used all of them. And the result — NPS 58 to 82, systems still running — was only possible because the stack was that deep. The jack of all trades framing assumes that each skill is shallow. That breadth comes at the cost of depth. But compound experience doesn't work that way. Each environment doesn't dilute the previous one — it recontextualizes it. I didn't understand what the ICU had taught me until I walked into URW and found myself observing spatial behavior with clinical precision. I didn't understand what Fraunhofer had taught me until I needed to build research infrastructure at Grau. I didn't understand what hospitality had taught me until I was mapping dealer experience at Birkenstock and could feel, in my body, what friction in a service system does to the person on the receiving end. The word for this isn't generalist. Generalists know a little about a lot. What I have is compound capability — multiple deep exposures that interact with each other in ways that a single-track career can't produce. The nurse who becomes a designer sees things the designer who was always a designer cannot. The spatial designer who worked in a library understands information architecture differently than someone who learned it from a textbook. The CX professional who spent years in hospitality reads service environments with a granularity that surveys can't capture. This is not a scattered career. It's a deliberately — and sometimes accidentally — constructed stack of capabilities that produces a specific kind of professional: someone who enters complex environments, reads them across multiple dimensions simultaneously, and builds systems that make the invisible visible. Every environment taught me something one environment alone never could have.